This invention is in the area of methods for the treatment of hepatitis B virus (also referred to as "HBV") that includes administering an effective amount of one or more of the active compounds disclosed herein, or a pharmaceutically acceptable derivative or prodrug of one of these compounds.
HBV is second only to tobacco as a cause of human cancer. The mechanism by which HBV induces cancer is unknown, although it is postulated that it may directly trigger tumor development, or indirectly trigger tumor development through chronic inflammation, cirrhosis, and cell regeneration associated with the infection.
Hepatitis B virus has reached epidemic levels worldwide. After a two to six month incubation period in which the host is unaware of the infection, HBV infection can lead to acute hepatitis and liver damage, that causes abdominal pain, jaundice, and elevated blood levels of certain enzymes. HBV can cause fulminant hepatitis, a rapidly progressive, often fatal form of the disease in which massive sections of the liver are destroyed.
Patients typically recover from acute viral hepatitis. In some patients, however, high levels of viral antigen persist in the blood for an extended, or indefinite, period, causing a chronic infection. Chronic infections can lead to chronic persistent hepatitis. Patients infected with chronic persistent HBV are most common in developing countries. By mid-1991, there were approximately 225 million chronic carriers of HBV in Asia alone, and worldwide, almost 300 million carriers. Chronic persistent hepatitis can cause fatigue, cirrhosis of the liver, and hepatocellular carcinoma, a primary liver cancer.
In western industrialized countries, high risk groups for HBV infection include those in contact with HBV carriers or their blood samples. The epidemiology of HBV is in fact very similar to that of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, which accounts for why HBV infection is common among patients with AIDS or HIV-associated infections. However, HBV is more contagious than HIV.
A human serum-derived vaccine has been developed to immunize patients against HBV. Vaccines have been produced through genetic engineering. While the vaccine has been found effective, production of the vaccine is troublesome because the supply of human serum from chronic carriers is limited, and the purification procedure is long and expensive. Further, each batch of vaccine prepared from different serum must be tested in chimpanzees to ensure safety. In addition, the vaccine does not help the patients already infected with the virus.
Daily treatments with .alpha.-interferon, a genetically engineered protein, has also shown promise. However, to date there is no known pharmaceutical agent that effectively inhibits the replication of the virus in humans.
In light of the fact that hepatitis B virus has reached epidemic levels worldwide, and has severe and often tragic effects on the infected patient, there remains a strong need to provide new effective pharmaceutical agents to treat humans infected with the virus that have low toxicity to the host.
Therefore, it is another object of the present invention to provide a method and composition for the treatment of human patients or other hosts infected with HBV.